Say you are visiting a nominally developed nation and you wish to travel from the country’s most populous metropolitan region to its 10th most populous, which sit fewer than 200 miles away from each other.
No big deal, you think.
You are familiar with other industrialized nations. You consider your recent sightseeing trip from Rome to Florence, Italy, a comparable distance between two significantly smaller cities. You hopped on the La Frecce high speed train in Rome and arrived in Florence in a mere 90 minutes—city center to city center on a train that looks like this.
Maybe you think back on a recent work trip to China, where you zipped from Beijing to Shanghai in 4.5 hours—a trip more than four times the distance.
So you open Google, ready to book what should be a simple, easy trip. What you find confounds you. You can take the bus—inexpensive, sure, but travel time is scheduled to be over four hours, and can easy extend beyond six with bad traffic. Then there’s flying: a gate-to-gate time of 76 minutes. Not bad! But there’s airport time (1-2 hours depending on your preference) and travel time from the city center to the airport and vice versa on the other end. The airport is not connected by metro, so you have to take a car and again possibly sit in traffic. Drive time on both ends combined is 1-1.5 hours. The flight option is looking less appealing: a total of anywhere from 3 hours 20 minutes on the low end to well over 4 hours 30 minutes on a bad day. And all told: quite expensive.
Things aren’t looking good so far. But let’s check the trains. A journey of this length, after all, is right in the sweet spot for high-speed train travel.
The rail operator lists tickets on their website: 3 hours and 45 minutes for the “high-speed” service, but because you’re booking last-minute tickets, the cost is prohibitive: more than $200 USD for the trip!
So you bite your lip and settle for the lower speed service, which only adds about 25 minutes to the trip overall but still costs 75% of the price.
This is the bleak picture facing travelers in the Northeast Corridor between Boston and New York every single day.
But how did it get to be this way?
The United States, after all, was built by rail. It wasn’t so long ago that the United States had the best, most advanced passenger rail network in the world. Today, it’s been reduced to shiny silver Amfleet I cars built in the 1970s swaying up and down the Northeast Corridor.
Even worse news: this is about as good as it gets in the U.S. The Northeast Regional is Amtrak’s busiest—and one of its only profitable—route(s), serving the Northeast Rail Corridor, from Washington, DC, to Boston, MA.
The rest of the country is in far worse shape.
This is not a problem of convenience or that of bourgeois whining—it’s a fundamental problem for the dynamism of the U.S. economy. The ability to move within a country is vital to its intellectual and innovative vibrance. The inability of people to move between major U.S. cities quickly and cheaply should concern everyone.
This series will explore how passenger rail in the U.S. has declined to its current sorry state—the easy narrative is that cars and air travel won out. But the real picture is much more complicated. Out of such complications come learnings—about business, about government (including anti-trust regulations), and about how we should be endeavoring to shape our national future.
I hope you’ll follow along for the ride.
DS
Dude good point, the rails made the USA and then they got replaced by trucks I assume? Make this series a little book please!
Let's talk trains, I'm so disappointed Asia is basically ahead of everyone when it come to trains.
Where I am trains are a mess since nobody want to invest in them and the distances don't justify the cost of high speed (unlike France and Germany)